Fear and Loathing in the Online Office Suite

There is one major hole in your review of alternatives to MSWord - you forgot about Open Office!

I use Mac at home and WinXP at work and have OpenOffice installed on both machines (same with Firefox and Thunderbird) and successfully coexist with the Word world. The best part about using this is that I get the same experience on OSX and XP, goodbye OS wars.

Open source, cross-platform software is the way of the future and I highly recommend it to everyone.

I realize the title of your article is about Online Office Suites but you really can't compare apples with oranges. Give OpenOffice a try and thank me later. BTW, there is a version of OO specifically designed for Macs called NeoOffice and it works great.

I know this has been said, but it can't be said enough. You forgot about Open Office!!

Even though the article was about online office software, you did mention that you had to go back to the comfort of microsoft office. Well, you didn't have to do that. Nine out of ten homies agree: Open office is the shiaznezz.

well yes i do agree that kids think it pretty much the same with word and google, except for the fact that typing up a paper is longer and much more boring, but you might want to try asking kids next time how THEY feel
CR

Of course, there are lots of problems with current online office suite.

There are two reasons I support online office:
1. One important fact we can't ignore is that the online documents can be edited and viewed anywhere anytime. Sometimes I revised my presentation all night but forgot to copy the file (in my PC) with me the next morning and went into the office. So I had to go back home and get it. If it is online, things will be different, you can easily retrieve the file from your office machine.

2. And crisis (by virus or mis-operation) can happen to any PC, but it is less likely for a big internet company such as google or zoho. It is much safer to let file online there.

However, I just wait for google docs and zoho to improve their compatibility with Microsoft Office, so there will be much more ease in online documenting.

A big issue with Open source office is that I can not find any plug-in for embedded equation editing.

Very good article for if you want to use software not installed or unable to install on the HDD.

But I am with everyone else open office is a brilliant counterpart to the Microsoft thuggery that we have grown use to. There is also gimp for a photoshop equivalent, maybe doesn't have the cushy interface of adobe but works.

There is loads of open source software out there but its taking the time and the confidence to look. It would brilliant to be able to purchase a PC, thats it just the PC not the plethora of software that comes with Windows.

As some comments already said before; the author forgets the OPEN OFFICE!! It is free, good and compatible with MSOffice.
I'm using it in 4 PC's at a business except one that needs MSAccess, and for cases of any incompatibility (minimum).
For business, let's say you can have one or 2 MSOffice and the rest O.Officce for free. You save money and works fine.That's a good point.
Regarding the online software, sorry but personally I don't trust it for business yet.

I'm going to add my voice to the chorus: you forgot about or ignored OpenOffice!

One of my problems with using online software like that is it can and will be updated/upgraded without your knowledge - and that could lead to compatibility issues with documents that you don't touch for long periods of time.

Another is security. If I'm working on a document and store it out in the web, even with 1024-bit crypto and passwords out the wazoo, I still can't be guaranteed of the document's security or privacy. I simply live with the concept that if I put it on the web, it's not private. Paranoid, maybe. Better safe than sorry, and in a world where black-hats are looking for anything and everything that they can sharpen their skills on, paranoid is not a bad thing.

So, OpenOffice. On my hard drive. Documents also on my hard drive, behind a NAT firewall in a private folder on a non-Microsoft run box.

I am also agreeing with everyone else on this article, try open office! You can't really compare an online service to desktop software. I've used all of the services you mentioned in the article (including word 2007, 2003, 2001, and 97) and I can safely say that I can tell no difference between open office and every MS word except 2007 (in fact, I like open office better than 2007) office 2007 is using the ribbon interface, totally different from Open office, though I don't really care for it (vista might be part of the problem). Pretty much what Microsoft has done with all of it's software (down to windows 1.01) is put lipstick on a pig. The first 4 Windows (1.01, 2, 2.1, and 3) were nothing more than DOS shells! I have been using Ubuntu Linux 8.10 for a little over a week now, and windows since my first 486. I liked a few windows editions (95, 98, and xp) but vista is a big mistake, the laptop I'm using now used to be vista until it got all screwed up with a deadly virus, and now it's ubuntu. Enough microsoft-bashing for now though
Dustin H

as a chorus rains down from the heavens singing: "you forgot open office!"

everyone in my family uses open office save for my brother who doesn't want to feel like he wasted money getting Microsoft word. i do an online school and the files that i need to send need to be in word document format (.doc) or rich text format (rtf.) open office has both of those and any problems with mistranslation has been from human error.

so yeah open office rocks and once again you forgot to mention it.

Just to add to the Open Office discussion. I had a big problem at work exporting mailing lists from an SQL database in to Excel. It seems that MS doesn't like the UTF8 character encoding, and so all French accents get converted in to garbage code. This was a serious problem in the work place.
I downloaded Open Office, and sure enough, it had no problem at all with the UTF8 encoding. I could even export back out to the MS format later on. And using the Open Office BASE program was a lot easier for certain data sorting and manipulation than with a spreadsheet. And since not all MS Office packages come with ACCESS (like my copy at work), I again found that Open Office was a superior tool. Oh ya, and it also comes with a PDF writer. Free.
As far as I'm concerned, Open Office isn't just AS GOOd as MS Office, but BETTER. And not just for my kids doing their homework, but for me at work. And not just because it is free. Seriously, it was a pleasure freeing myself from one more dysfunctional Microsoft chain.

Thanks to you guys, I'm downloading OpenOffice right now.

I'm starting to get sick of Office 03'.

(+1 to the chorus of openoffice)